Giorgia Meloni has won her bet: this 45-year-old Roman is on her way to becoming the new face of Italy.

Under his presidency, Fratelli d'Italia became the leading party in the country with nearly a quarter of the votes in the legislative elections on Sunday.

In pole position to become the first female head of government in the history of Italy, Giorgia Meloni embodies a movement with post-fascist DNA that she managed to "de-demonize" to come to power.

In the 2018 legislative elections, FDI had to settle for a meager 4% of the vote, but Giorgia Meloni has since managed to gather on her behalf the discontent and frustrations of the many Italians exasperated by the "dictates" of Brussels, the high cost of living and the blocked future of young people.

A reference “for protest, disaffection”

Its motto ?

“God, fatherland, family”.

His priorities?

Close the borders to protect Italy from "Islamization", renegotiate European treaties so that Rome can regain control of its destiny, fight against "LGBT lobbies" and the country's "demographic winter", whose average age is the highest in the industrialized world, just behind Japan.

In 2016, she denounced "the ethnic replacement in progress in Italy", in unison with other European far-right formations.

“Meloni represents a point of reference for contestation, protest, disaffection,” analyzes Sofia Ventura, professor of political science at the University of Bologna.

She and her party are the heirs of the Italian Social Movement (MSI), a neo-fascist party created after the Second World War.

A game of balance between its base and the moderates

At 19, she told the French channel France 3 that the dictator Benito Mussolini was "a good politician".

But, if it must spare its base which claims this past, it also knows that to win, it must reassure the moderates.

“If I were a fascist, I would say that I am a fascist,” she defended herself in a recent interview with British magazine

The Spectator

.

In a consummate balancing act, she still recognizes today that Mussolini had “accomplished a lot”, without exonerating him from his “mistakes”: the anti-Jewish laws and going to war.

And to clarify: in its ranks, "there is no place for those nostalgic for fascism, nor for racism and anti-Semitism".

Born in Rome on January 15, 1977, Giorgia Meloni became an activist at the age of 15 in student associations classified on the very right, while working as a babysitter or waitress.

In 1996, she became the head of a high school association, Azione Studentesca, whose emblem is the Celtic Cross.

In 2006, his journey accelerated.

She becomes deputy and vice-president of the chamber.

Two years later, she was appointed Minister of Youth in the government of Silvio Berlusconi.

This is his only government experience. 

She then assiduously frequents the TV sets.

Her youth, her temerity, her formulas make her a good client for the media.

She understands that, at least as much as the ideas, the personality of a young and pretty blond woman in an Italy still very macho seduces.

“I am Giorgia, I am a woman, I am a mother, I am Italian, I am a Christian”, she launched to her supporters in 2019 in Rome during a fervent speech that became famous.

This talented orator who knows how to speak to the guts of Italians by cultivating her popular accent typical of Rome, can also be brittle, even aggressive.

And sometimes falls into bad taste, as in this video posted on Sunday on TikTok where she shows herself with two melons in her hands at the level of her breasts, in reference to her last name.

Refusal of national union in 2021

At the end of 2012, tired of the dissensions that gnaw on the right, she founded Fratelli d'Italia with other dissidents of Berlusconism, and chose to camp in the opposition.

When Mario Draghi, former governor of the European Central Bank, formed a cabinet of national unity in February 2021 to get Italy out of the health and economic crisis, she and her party were the only ones to refuse to participate.

“Italy needs a free opposition,” she said then.

It is in the name of this freedom, synonymous with sovereignty, that this Atlanticist denounces the Russian invasion of Ukraine from day one.

This Monday, she therefore returned to another dimension.

"Italians have sent a clear message in favor of a right-wing government led by Fratelli d'Italia," she said in a brief address.

“We will govern for all” Italians, she further promised.

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